1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to paging methods, devices, and systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for adaptively setting wake-up intervals in a paging device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Subscribers to today's paging services can receive messages any time of the day, so long as their pagers are active (i.e., turned on). Active pagers monitor page messages transmitted from central paging stations and receive those messages containing recognizable address codes. Inactive pagers, on the contrary, do not receive page messages. Accordingly, to avoid missing any page messages, many subscribers prefer to keep their pagers active all the time. Since pagers consume power while they are active, however, pagers that are active all the time quickly drain batteries. The result is frequent battery replacement, which is both inconvenient and costly.
To conserve battery power, most pagers are equipped with a conventional power-saving feature that automatically causes the pagers to be turned on and off periodically to "wake-up" and look for pages only during a predefined interval--the wake-up interval. The central paging stations typically keep track of the wake-up interval(s) for each pager and only transmit page messages to those pagers during their respective wake-up intervals. In this way, pagers consume a fraction of the power they would otherwise use, without missing any page messages.
Although this feature conserves some power in these pagers, valuable power is still wasted. The pagers uniformly become active during their respective wake-up intervals throughout the day according to their programming. However, there may be times of the day when these pagers receive few or no page messages, during which times these pagers remain substantially idle, though active, and, thus, unnecessarily waste power. For instance, some pagers may receive a high volume of page messages during business hours (i.e., between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.) and receive no page messages during non-business hours. The conventional power-saving feature would unnecessarily cause these pagers to become active during non-business hours with the same frequency as during business hours, thereby wasting battery power.